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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday January 1, 2000 Volume III Number 1 |
FOCUS - Rain Man
In 1935, Dr. António Egas Moniz, a Portuguese physician, discovered a surgical means of controlling aggressive, even violent behavior. By 1949, his work influenced medicine around the world. That year, his procedure won him a Nobel Prize. The category: physiology or medicine. He shared the honor with Dr. Walter Rudolph Hess, a Swiss physiologist who discovered the workings of the hypothalamus – the portion of the brain that controls blood pressure.
Dr. Moniz’s procedure involved the surgical removal or disabling of the two prefrontal lobes of the cortex of the human brain. In the early thirties, he experimented with monkeys, once excitable and edgy, after the surgery became docile and calm. By severing the connection between the two halves of this delicate organ, the neurologist effectively and permanently neutralized aggressive behavior. His work on humans was emulated and then duplicated around the globe, and hailed as a deterrent against the fearful physical threat rooted in severe mental disorders.
The procedure became known as lobotomy.
Today, lobotomy is an embarrassing chapter in modern medicine. The 1975 film, based on Ken Kesey’s classic novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, soundly demonized the procedure as a dehumanizing butchery implemented by powerful institutions behind closed doors – a way of sanitizing the uncomfortable business of caring for those who don’t quite fit. It’s not simply that alternative drug therapies have reduced the need for this radical means of affecting behavior. Lobotomy is direct assault on our sense of decency. It became a cruel disfigurement; the radical, irreversible destruction of complex human tissue.
Fran Peek knew the risks. He knew the implications. He said no. Absolutely not.
* * * * * * * *
When Kim Peek was born in November of 1951, he wasn’t like the other babies snuggled up in blankets on display just the other side of the window of the maternity ward. His head was enlarged. They called it encephalocele. As Kim grew, his motor skills just didn’t keep up. His father knew something was wrong. That’s when the tests began.
Kim had difficulty controlling his responses. That’s when the doctor predicted that Kim would spend the rest of his life needing intensive care. He wanted to give Kim’s parents an out. He said, “Kim should be given a surgery that will calm him down. And then you can leave him in a State facility where he will receive professional attention and care.”
“What is the surgery?” Kim’s father asked.
“It’s called a lobotomy,” was the reply.
“No,” Fran Peek said. “We will care for Kim ourselves. No lobotomy.”
And that was that.
From early on, Fran knew that his son Kim had a special gift. The first hint came at just sixteen months. Fran would read a simple children’s book, and Kim would repeat back what he’d heard… in the syllables of a small child, and yet both comprehensibly and comprehensively. Kim would repeat the entire story. From memory.
As Fran read aloud, he would point to the text. His little boy would follow. Soon he was reading on his own, and in every instance, Kim memorized each book in its entirety with just one reading. At an unusually rapid pace.
Doctors and psychologists were perplexed. They diagnosed him first with learning disabilities. Then with a form of autism. Physically, developmentally, he was way behind his peers. But intellectually, Kim digested mountains of material. With total recall.
As he grew, he memorized the dictionary. He could repeat definitions with precision, and proper pronunciation. Then he became fascinated with numbers. Professional sports. Football. Basketball. Baseball. Kim knew the scores of every game of the season, and new exactly who would be the contender for this year’s championships. Then he turned to the history of the teams. He mastered every World Series, Superbowl and NBA Championship Series in the century. He knew the games and the players and the plays. He learned zip codes. Area codes. The system of Interstate Highways criss-crossing the nation. Mileage distances between cities. Then he turned to Hollywood and the movies. He memorized the Oscar winners. The cast members. The actors and actresses. Directors. One reading. Total recall.
He can instantly calculate the day of the week is he’s told the date of the month and year of an event – such as a birthday, anniversary, or historical event. “You were born on a Tuesday,” he’ll say. Check it, and he’s right.
Physicians who studied Kim began calling him a savant. His intellectual skills remained a mystery. But they were real. He was becoming a scholar. A bibliophile. A bookworm. He remained, however, a social outcast.
Kim turned to history. Encyclopedias. Literature. Authors. Classic music. To date, it is estimated that this forty eight year old man has devoured seven thousand six hundred books and counting. Doctors continue to study Kim. An MRI shows clearly that Kim’s brain is malformed. The corpus callosum, the tissue that connects the left and right hemispheres of Kim’s brain is missing entirely. X-rays show an unusual and severe damage to the cerebellum. Kim is not unique. Other neurological patients have similar deficiencies, but none with Kim’s capacity for learning and more spectacularly, all with total recall.
One of the most astonishing findings was the way in which Kim reads. His eyes need correction. Through the thick lenses of his glasses, Kim holds his open book close to his face. With his right eye, he reads the page on the right. With his left, he simultaneously reads the page on the left. As he scans from top to bottom, he masters both pages at the very same time.
Researchers want to find out how Kim’s brain works. But to this day, it remains a mystery. Some of the tests that have been proposed are risky. Kim’s health is generally good, but because of his other disabilities his risk profile is higher than normal. Kim’s father has resisted the kind of intensive testing that could jeopardize Kim’s health.
In February, 1987, Kim got a visit from the famous actor, Dustin Hoffman. Hoffman was cast to play a character named Raymond Babbitt in a movie called Rain Man along with co-actor Tom Cruise. The movie became a box office smash, and when Hoffman accepted his academy award to years later before a watching world he said, “My special thanks to Kim Peek for making Rain Man a reality."
And decades earlier, for his disabled son, Fran Peek was encouraged to consider a lobotomy.
* * * * * *
Friday night, we bid farewell to a young family, a Dad and a Mom, a daughter and three sons. As we close out the year 2000, Craig and Sarah are boarding a Singapore Air jumbo jet bound for Southeast Asia. They are returning to their work as linguists. They leave the comfort and relative safety of this part of the world to pick up where they left off six months ago.
The ultimate focal point of their work is a people group located on a remote island in Indonesia. Living in a small village with their young family, a village we would call primitive, on the waters of the blue Pacific, they spent over five years studying a culture and making friends. They learned the hierarchy and built relationships with community leaders. And then they set up literacy classes. Taught maintenance and repair of machines. Built a new system that provided a dependable source of fresh, clean water for the community.
And they learned the language. An ancient language, never before reduced to writing. It was a language spoken by people who could not read or write it. Today, there is a dictionary. Several books. Instruction books. Children’s story books. With an alphabet that today is written and read a whole community.
As we turn the page on a New Year, Indonesia is in turmoil. Warring factions are on the move. It’s been called a civil war. Terrorism reigns. There are bombings and shootings and open conflict. The US Department of State has issued travel warnings to Americans. The world press hardly pays attention, because in this remote part of the world, frankly, not much that interests a sizzling global economy is at stake. “Let ‘em go at it…” seems to be the attitude of the rest of the world, pre-occupied with other things.
Their primary goal is to complete their translation of the New Testament into this unique language that before Craig and Sarah had only been spoken. They’ve already completed two major books – the Gospel According to Mark and the Acts of the Apostles. Craig tells me it will take about five more years to complete the work.
This weekend, Craig and Sarah packed up their four kids and returned to a land they love. They have a purpose.
And they are taking a calculated risk.
* * * * * * * *
They call Kim Peek a human computer. Some call him “Kimputer.” Researchers have drawn few conclusions. No one quite knows how it is that this disabled middle-aged man has such fantastic recall.
Since
the movie Rain Man, Kim seems more comfortable with himself.
He has come to understand that his amazing capacity for learning is an
inspiration. Barry Morrow, who
wrote the screenplay, originally cast an aging Mickey Rooney to place the part.
Kim met with the two of them, and got interested in the work of the
Association for Retarded Citizens (ARC). That
opened the door for Kim to begin making appearances on high school and college
campuses and with community service organizations.
Kim’s friendliness and newfound openness gives him an entrée to a
wide audience. And everywhere he
shows up, people are motivated to learn, to share, to study and to read. Already, estimates are that Kim has personally spoken to
nearly nine hundred thousand people.
Scientists are not so surprised that he can comprehend all of the books he’s read. What is astonishing to everyone is his capacity for immediate and total recall.
Scientists suggest that the human brain has an astounding capacity for storing information. We have only begun to understand how efficiently we can access all that information stored inside our heads.
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. The first day of the year 2001. As of last night, midnight, the much-ballyhooed year 2000 has come to an end. What a year it was.
As a leader, you’ve counted up the accomplishments and you’ve dismissed the disappointments. You’ve chalked up the achievements and crossed out the regrets. And now there’s a new year ahead to do it all again, this time better.
You have a healthy body. And a bright, capable mind. You’ve only begun to understand the power and capacity of that gray matter still functioning behind your eyes and between your ears. The hard drive in your head may need an occasional defrag (a program that re-arranges the data bits in your computer) but there is still room for more information. Make it wholesome. On point. Useful. Good stuff that will get you where you know you need to go, and take good people with you.
Kim Peek teaches is that there are no limits to our capacity to learn. We’ll need new and fresh ideas. We’ll need a new level of motivation. We need new skills, and a new ability to articulate vision. We will set new directions, define new horizons for ourselves and for our people.
And as Craig and Sarah set out for a dangerous part of the world, so we will face risks, and twists and unanticipated turns. But our values will shape our behavior. Our hopes and dreams will inform our choices. Our beliefs will set the tone of our agendas.
As planet earth spins around the fireball we call the sun one more time, we’ll rack up one more year in our personal journey.
And my wish for you, on this bright morning that dawns the first new day of this new year, is that the eternal God who made all things, sustains all things, the one who gave you your life, will be your constant companion all year through.
Happy New Year!
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2000
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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